


Letter, April 2000

by sophiahelix



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-03-01
Updated: 2001-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-19 12:54:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/pseuds/sophiahelix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letter, April 2000

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Diana Battis and Jintian for the beta.

I'm so sorry you're reading this.

I know you, Scully, and I know what you're like right now. I know that you spend your days in mindless drudgery and your nights in sleepless hell. I know that you eat only when you have to, and that when people look you in the eye you stare them down until they flinch away.

I know because I was you, once, a long time ago.

I can't say enough how sorry I am that you've received this at all. If things go as I'd like to think they will, this letter will spend eternity at the bottom of Byers' sock drawer. But since you are reading it, I have to assume -- ah, fuck this.

I'm writing this to try and explain why I didn't tell you. I know that's what you ask yourself every day. You think I betrayed you, that I didn't care enough about you to let you in. You're running over the last year in your mind, trying to think of any clue I might have given you, any hint I dropped that death was in my immediate future. And I know you won't find any, because I worked so hard to keep my secret. I spent what will be -- what were -- the last months of my life trying to keep you happy.

I know my deception will have hurt you. I hate lying--maybe as you read this I've already confessed. But you, Scully, you should understand why we keep these terrible secrets from the people closest to us. I remember you writing something similar to this years ago, in your own dark hour. And I remember you throwing it away because you had found something far more important -- hope. Well, hope is just a distant memory for me now. I'm writing this as my own poor eulogy. My absolution.

I know how you must appear to everyone these days. Loss doesn't decimate you the way it does other people -- it slices away thin layers of you, and leaves you so hard inside that you sharpen everything you touch. I know losing me must have cut you deep, perhaps deeper than any loss from your past, but the people around you would never know that.

Others -- your father, probably -- would call you a good soldier, admire your stiff upper lip and your self-control and the astonishing way you deal with crisis and tragedy. They'll tell you that your strength and stoicism are what got you where you are today--and with me gone, I'm sure you're miles above the basement -- and behind your back they'll call you ballbuster and woman of steel and every other stupid cliche for a woman with a backbone.

I know why you never break down, Scully.

I know that you're thin iron and china, and that cracking is not an option because one chip and the whole thing goes to hell. I know you're afraid to shatter.

And now you're angry with me, for thinking you vulnerable and weak, for assuming that because you're beautiful you must be fragile too. You're imagining me delirious and self-righteous, the way I could be sometimes, and spending at least half a moment not missing me at all.

Good.

I want you to be angry with me. I want you to think and feel anything that will make you let go of me and live your life. I want you to remember the terrible things I did and said sometimes, and the way I was always trying to leave you behind for your own sake. I can't stand to think that you would waste your life missing a man who isn't worth the trouble.

I love you, Scully, honestly and truly. I think I've always loved you. But that love was never enough.

I could say it under my breath, or when you fell asleep in the car, or when I was drugged out of my mind. And however much I loved you, I guess it wasn't enough to stop me from hurting you over and over again. You needed my love like a hole in the head, if that's what got you where you are today.

As I write this, I can only hope that none of this will be true. This is a promise shot into a dark future I don't want to think about, a world where I loved you so much it hurt and yet went on blindly pushing you away. A world where I left you.

This is for you in case I never make things right.

I shouldn't be writing this. I should be telling you this tomorrow. I should leave this quiet hospital and drive to your apartment and die in your arms with love on my lips. I should do all the things I was too cowardly to do over the last ten years. I should thank Skinner for saving my job and my life, move out of my shithole apartment, kill the smoking man and tell you I love you. I should have called my mother. I should have stopped jumping trains and spaceships and bought a house in the suburbs. I should have lived my life.

You know me, and you know that I can't change.

But with death creeping so close, I can't help but look back at the tornado wreck in my wake and wish I was leaving behind something more substantial than an office full of horror stories and the hardened version of a woman I met seven years ago.

So I'll tell you now, a year after you lose me and the wounds are dull enough for you to hear me clearly, that I love you. The coward's way out. My insurance against the failure of my better self.

I'd like to think that this letter won't be read. I'd like to think that I have another fifty years of summer nights and winter mornings to love you, to make myself into a man worthy of loving you.

I can't ask you to forgive me. I can't forgive myself. I hate that I'm going to die with my goodbyes still unsaid. This coward won't rot away in a sterile bed with machines stretching out the pain until it's thin and unbearable. I hate how much I'm going to hurt you.

This letter is pointless.

Don't miss me. Don't think of me. Don't push yourself into exhausted oblivion for the next twenty years. Don't let yourself die.

Don't let the dark win.

I love you.

I'm sorry.

\-----

_"There is truth here, old friend, if that's all you seek, but there's no justice or judgment, without which truth is a vast, dead hollow. Go back. Do not look into the abyss or let the abyss look into you. Awaken the sleep of reason and fight the monsters within and without."_

"The Blessing Way"

**Author's Note:**

> Read Blackwood's companion piece [Melancholy in Common Time](http://web.archive.org/web/20060209003246/http://black.wood.tripod.com/melancholy.txt).


End file.
